ANTHONY LISTER

(1979, Brisbane, Australia)

Lister is a painter and Installation artist whoes work presents us with a grimy fusion of high and lowbrow culture with influences from a number of areas and genres, including street art, expressionism, pop art, and contemporary youth culture, often drawing from television and the "misguided role models" that result. Revelling in the "spirituality", and the "heritage" of Western popular culture he takes this joint legacy and remoulds it into something equally alluring and grotesque, a perfect representation of the society he seeks to depict. 

Taking influence from the dirtier and rough techniques of "Bad" Painting and merging it with the spirit and practices of graffiti art Lister has embraced an explosive, scratchy, scrawling form of figurative art using a variety of mediums from painting, drawing and installation to film and music.

Lister uses comic book imagery for his own means, redirecting popular culture for personal expression. Heroes and villains are taken out of the panel and placed in a new space, devoid of the usual storyline, dialogue and scenery. His paintings are not controlled by cartoon contexts. Rather, the figures in these portraits are reinvented through the artist’s hand. His mixed media technique, involving layers of ink, spray and brushwork, allow his paintings to simultaneously have soft ethereality and a garish, raw energy.

Watch his interview by We Love Street-Art:

ADAM CALDWELL

(1963, Massachusetts, US)

Adam's paintings and drawings juxtapose elements of abstract expressionism and classical figuration. Throwing in layers of images of ancient ruins, social protest, war, and architecture, he seeks to explore  the contemporary depiction of sexy, southern, white-trash women, who are a stereotypical result of writings by Caldwell’s grandfather. 

During his training at the California College of Arts and Crafts, he began to create collage drawings that layered disparate images on top of one another; he now uses oil paint in a similar way, starting with an abstract background and then adding more photorealistic details, allowing the work to dictate its own construction. The resulting palimpsest of figures and abstract shapes represents the conflicted and paradoxical emotions that underlie his work.

Caldwell's paintings evoke the tensions between mind and body, self and other, present and past. They also raise questions about the nature of identity, particularly concerning issues of gender and sexuality. He is deeply concerned about the world around him, and his work reflects his reactions to social issues such as war and consumerism by contrasting images from American advertisements and popular culture with images of rituals from around the world.